Saturday, July 08, 2006

War as an after thought

Good morning. Covering a few things in this entry. C.I.'s holding entries to note some stuff from me and others so let me get started and move quick. First off, here's C.I.'s "Iraq snapshot" from Friday:

Chaos and violence continue.Iraq was rocked with bombings today. As Sandra Lupien noted on KPFA's The Morning Show, "As many as 17 are dead and at least 50 wounded following attacks on mosques." The BBC reports that the bombs went off "in Baghdad and Baquba following Friday prayers." Al Jazeera notes that, in Baghdad, a car bomb went off near one Sunni mosque and a mortar round landed on another. In addition to the mortar attack on the mosque, Reuters reports another one in Baghdad that took the lieves of at least three people and wounded at least 30. Reuters also notes a car bomb exploding near a mosque in Tal Banat ("killed six and wounded 46") and that three people were gunned down in Mosul. The Associated Press reports that, in Sinjar, at least eight died and 48 were wounded when "a car bomb exploded near a Shiite mosque".Along with the above, the AFP reports that two sheikhs may have been kidnapped. Sheikh Said Mohammed Taha al-Samarrai of Mahmudiyah is reported kidnapped and killed according to Sunni members of Parliament. The second sheikh believed to be kidnapped is Sheikh Alaa Mohammed Abbas al-Rikabi -- and that's according to Sheikh Abdel Ghafur al-Sammarai who also states "that 181 Sunni clerics have been killed since February."Mahmudiyah was the hometown of Abeer Qasim Hamza, the 15-year-old who was allegedly rape before being killed (along with three of her family members) by US military forces. Steven D. Green is the only one charged so far. In court Thursday, his attorney Scott Wendelsdorf "entered a plea of 'not guilty on all counts,'" Reuters reports.In peace news, Bay Area Code Pink is fasting and picketing . . . outside the home of War Hawk Di Fi (the home warbucks is building): " Senator Diane Feinstein recently voted against John Kerry's amendment calling for the troops to come home. Let's make sure she doesn't disappoint her constituents again. Gather with us, as we encourage her to co-sponsor the Harkin bill (S. CON. RES 93) -- no permanent military presence or military bases in Iraq; no attempt to control the flow of Iraqi oil; and Armed Forces should be redeployed from Iraq as soon as practicable after the completion of Iraq's constitution-making process or December 31, 2006 - which ever comes first."CODEPINK also continues their fast in DC and elsewhere as people across the country continue fasting or begin to show their support. Kris Wise (Daily Mail) writes of West Virginians taking part in the fast and quotes Janie Poe: "I'll go for as long as my body can hold out or until my group tells me to stop. It's probably detrimental for us on our bodies, but it's us screaming out to people to wake up."Today on KPFA's The Morning Show, Andrea Lewis interviewed Dahr Jamail and Mark Manning (info on tonight's event below) on the subject of Iraq. On the issue of the alleged rape and the murders, Dahr Jamail said, "This type of thing is happening on a regular basis in Iraq . . . [rapes during house raids] even in the capital city of Baghdad." Mark Manning pointed out that the legal immunity given to contractors and the military has created "a huge problem" and that the Iraqis have seen too many incidents being wiped away without investigation.Event tonight:An upcoming event: Brava Theater, 2789 24th Street, San Francisco, Friday, July 7th, 7:00 pm. (415-647-2822)Mark Manning will be screening his film Caught in the Crossfire for those interested in knowing the realities on Falluja that Dexy and the other Green Zoners never got around to telling you. Nadia McCaffrey, who lost her son in the Iraq war, will bespeaking as will Dahr Jamail.

The event was last night. You should check out Manning's movie and know who Nadia McCaffrey is so I'm leaving it in.

So how are you doing? I'm doing better, a lot better. Nina told me last night she wanted to scream "Get over it!" at me a couple of times this week. :D I'm glad I didn't.

Last night was the group meeting where we get together to talk about the war. A few hours before, C.I. called to ask me how my speech was going? I was going to speak for ten minutes and then we were going to have the usual discussion. C.I. listened to me whine again (for about what see Polly's Brew last week for my column). C.I.'s listened all week. (Thanks for that.) I know Elaine would have said, "Work your way through it, Mike, don't stuff it in." I was thinking C.I. was trying to fill in for Elaine since she was on vacation. That still may be true but twenty minutes into my long whine, I answered a question (don't even remember now what it is) and I go, "I just don't think you treat the war like an after thought." C.I. goes, "Mike, that's your real speech."

For about a minute I was all, "Hey, I've been memorizing the speech I'm giving tonight and" all this stuff and then it hit me, that is my speech. C.I. goes, "Call me back in thirty." And I wrote that speech in link ten minutes. I then gave it to my parents to make sure I wasn't crazy about it being a good speech. The loved it and then I called back C.I. and after I finished giving it, C.I. goes, "See, if you hadn't gone through all you did, you couldn't have written that speech." That's true.

So "War As An After Thought" was my speech and people really seemed to like it. Usually, if I have to speak in front of a class, I'm so nervous and just wanting it to be over. I wasn't nervous last night. And everybody really liked the topic and it led to this really good discussion that lasted about two and a half hours with everybody providing their own examples. Since Polly was kind enough to run my column last Sunday, I offered it to her for this weeks' newsletter and she really loves it too. She passed it over to Gareth and Pru because they both e-mailed me and they really liked it. You can judge for yourself tomorrow when Polly's Brew comes out.

I don't know that it's all that but it really was an important topic and that probably helped. And people all wanted to share their own examples last night. Nina goes if I had to mope all the way through the week to get that it was worth it. :D

If you read it tomorrow, add your own examples (there are plenty, I heard lots of them last night) and then stop downing the peace movement which is working hard even if others aren't. It was really amazing to hear all the obstacles we were up against and really makes you appreciate all the work that groups and individuals are doing and have done.

C.I. asked me if I'd add something here (which I think is just C.I.'s way of trying to help me blog): someone e-mailed John Dean's recent column in for a highlight. C.I.'s not linking to it. How come? John Dean writes of someone who has never stood trial, someone who John Dean knows no evidence about (only what the Bully Boy's administration has said), that the guy's "a bad guy." C.I. says: "A lawyer doesn't right that. A lawyer knows better. John Dean's a wonderful commentator but under no circumstances will his 'verdicts' on Guantanamo detainees be linked to by The Common Ills when so many have been fighting not just for their right to trial but also for their very lives. Hopefully, that was Dean's attempt to move on to the 'bigger point' but the thing is, as a lawyer, he should grasp that innocence until proved guilty is a very 'big point.' You don't just tread over it in your rush to make another point."

Which is the perfect set up to my segment of this week's broadcast of Law and Disorder which I catch via WBAI. Rachel Meeropol with the Center for Constitutional Rights was the guest for the second segment. She talked about the roundups that took place after 9/11.

Think about that. Like right now, picture it's October 2001. You haven't seen your dad since the morning of September 11 and so you and everybody in your family is thinking he died in the attacks. That happened to some people because their fathers or husbands got rounded up in secret. They weren't guilty of terrorism, they were 'guilty' of being Muslim. And that's all the government needed to go after them. It continued to happen after 9/11 and that's what Meeropol works for, or one of the issues, at the Center for Constitutional Rights. I knew from the show and from C.I. that this was an issue Dalia Hashad had put in lots of time on. But if you didn't know that before the segment, you knew it during. I like it when she just puts it out there. There's no attempt to sweeten it up. You can tell she's pissed off and I love that.

I think too much time is spent trying to act above it all. What happened was outrageous and when you're talking about something like that, you should be outraged. People were rounded up in secret, the Muslim community was targeted, there was no need for the government to explain itself because they acted in secret. This is horrible that it happened anywhere but it shows you just how bad things were and are under the Bully Boy that it could happen here.

All it took was a little fear and then a lot of fear mongering and we were all like, "Do whatever! Just make us safe! Take away the monster from under our beds!"

So a lot of innocent people got targeted and then treated like dogs. They weren't treated like human beings and I honestly think if we'd treated dogs like this, people would have complained. But we were all being chicken littles running around screaming. If we'd had a real leader, we would have responded differently.

They talked about, Meeropol, Dalia, Heidi Boghosian and Michael Smith, how people were just taken away. Some of them, if they were American citizens didn't get deported. But they got rounded up too. I hope they'll do a segement on that soon. (I'm pretty sure they have before but I think it's starting to sink in how awful that was.)

People lost their lives. I'd be interested in hearing from family members because there's no way you can go on with your life if that happens to your father or your brother or your husband. The people rounded up were in this black hole, they couldn't have any contact with anyone. If you somehow found out that someone was rounded up, you couldn't talk to them. I know that some people tried to visit the places they were held in and they'd get there and find out, "Oh they were moved last night." They kept doing that, moving them around in the middle of the night. And imagine what that's like. Probably the first day, you're thinking, "Okay, this is a huge mistake. They're going to realize that and let me go." Then it goes on and you have to lose hope and start feeling like you're really all alone and no one can help you.

So listen to the segment and get outraged. I think we've spent too many times being calm about everything. Being calm about what was done to our Muslim-Americans and our Muslim visitors (there's probably a better word for it but I think "visitor" works because we encourage people to visit this country, to come to it and for a better life and we proved that if you're a guest in this country, you're not welcome with our actions on this). Being calm about the war.

We hear about Abu Ghraib and we kind of shurg our shoulders. It's wrong, we'll say but we're not supposed to get too outraged or too upset. We're supposed to say, "These things happen." I think it's past time we got outraged.

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About Me

I'm Michael, Mike to my friends. College student working his way through. I'm also Irish-American and The New York Times can kiss my Irish ass. And check out Trina's Kitchen on my links, that's my mother's site.